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Gather Health empowers patients to take charge of their health by activating a holistic care team around them – including their physician, nutritionist, family, and other patients like them.

Turns out the best way to get people to exercise isn’t talking about long-term health benefits, but focusing on immediate rewards like stress relief, better mood, more energy, and opportunity to connect with family and friends. In fact, people who have goals aimed at losing weight or improving health tend to spend the least amount of time exercising.

More evidence that financial incentives can help people quit smoking, this time among pregnant women.

At-home self-testing of blood pressure was found to effective in helping people manage their hypertension and benefits continued six months after the program had ended.

In the US, changing regulations for telemedicine, with many states allowing establishment of doctor-patient relationship and prescription of medication by video. Washington recently became the 24th state to require insurance reimbursement for some telemedicine services.

Gather Health empowers patients to take charge of their health by activating a holistic care team around them – including their physician, nutritionist, family, and other patients like them.

We know incentives are important, but how important?

Financial incentives are more effective than typical care, finds a creative study on financial incentives and smoking cessation. All 4 incentive programs (individual or group, reward or deposit) were more effective than the typical approach of providing information and free aids (patches, gum). People were much more likely to agree to join a reward program than one requiring them to deposit money up-front and have it returned if they successfully quit smoking. However, those who agreed to the deposit program were twice as likely to successfully quit. There were few differences between the individual and group interventions. NEJM wrote a very readable editorial as well as publishing the full study.

Also some knowledge about diabetes to blow your mind.

The relative importance of diet and exercise in losing weight (spoiler: eating less is a lot more important than exercising more).

An exploration of how diabetes may differ in Asian-Indians compared to Caucasians finds Indians are more likely to have high central obesity, increased inflammatory markers, greater insulin resistance, and higher risk of coronary artery disease.

Over in the US, over half of millennials with diabetes say that they would trust a health app over a health professional for advice.

Gather Health empowers patients to take charge of their health by activating a holistic care team around them – including their physician, nutritionist, family, and other patients like them.

A national survey in India finds among the urban middle class, >25% of people with diabetes are undiagnosed. Among those with diagnosed diabetes, blood sugar control is poor as is awareness, treatment, and control of high blood sugar and cholesterol.

Speaking of food, a dietary survey in India revealed that carbs comprise nearly 2/3rds of a typical Indian diabetic’s diet (vs. 40-50% in the West). While 2/3rds were adherent to a diet plan their physician recommended, nearly half had not received diet counseling!

Active discussion in the US about what type of care nurses should be allowed to provide, particularly in rural areas and under what type of supervision, if any.

Accenture projects that by 2018 there will be >100 FDA approved digital health devices, saving the healthcare system nearly $100billion USD.

And last but far from least, the annual report on internet trends by Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins. TechCrunch’s pithy summary, and the full deck. Particularly notable are the slides on internet penetration in India: